10. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

By Stephen Mullen

There is a strange irony to love stories. To be stories, something has to change – and so it seems if you want the film to end with lovers together, happily ever after, they have to spend the bulk of the film apart. Enemies, even. And on the other side – if you show the lovers together, show their happiness in the film, the story demands that something changes – they have to be parted. And so the irony – the most powerful depictions of love and desire in films are often in the doomed love affairs, while in films with happy endings, lovers spend the whole show fighting – a merry war perhaps – but war, any any case… Tragedies and romantic comedies – Romeo and Juliet; and Much Ado About Nothing – the models for so many love stories, in their broad shape at least. Blissful lovers parted; bickering enemies united.

But that offers a challenge to a clever storyteller – how do you show people in love and still have a happy ending? How do you honor the conventions of romantic comedy (about what keeps people who belong together apart), while showing them actually in love? I suppose there are as many ways to do this as there are romantic comedies – mistaken identities, amnesia, class expectations, the comedy of remarriage – or – this one. What if the lovers are pen pals? what if they have never met, but have fallen in love with one another in words, two lonely, clever people stuck in their hard lives in the big city – who find they have a bond? What about that? And then – they meet in the real world – and take a dislike to one another – and – then you’ll have a story! You’ll have a story where they are in love with one another from the start, and enemies from the start; they can be as romantic as they want; they can bicker and fight and put each other down to their heart’s content. (And cleverly – well enough they start to be impressed with their mutual nastiness.) Yes – then, you just have to play it out, the revelations, the consequences of lies and truths and self-deception – until, of course, it all comes together.

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